[This issue of Peking Review is from massline.org. Massline.org has kindly given us permission to to place these documents on the MIA. We made only some formatting changes to make them congruent with our style sheets. Note from massline.org: This article is reprinted from Peking Review, Volume 9, #33, Aug. 12, 1966, pp. 24-27. Thanks are due to the www.wengewang.org web site for some of the work done for this posting.

This speech was given at a demonstration in Peking on Aug. 8, 1966 condemning
discrimination in the U.S. against Afro-Americans, and in support of their right to
use revolutionary violence in response to the counter-revolutionary violence of the
U.S. and local governments and other racist reactionaries against them. The rally
was held on the third anniversary of Mao’s “Statement Supporting the American
Negroes in Their Just Struggle Against Racial Discrimination by U.S. Imperialism”.]

Speech by U.S. Negro Leader Robert Williams

Brothers, Sisters, Patriots, Revolutionaries:

Once again, I want to thank Chairman Mao Tse-tung
and our brothers, the great Chinese people for their support of our struggle.
Commemorating the third anniversary of Chairman Mao Tse-tung’s statement calling upon
the people of the world to unite against racial discrimination by U.S. imperialism and
support the American Negroes in their struggle against racial discrimination, the
greatest tribute that can be paid to the correctness of his immortal words lie in a
current analysis and assessment of the present development of struggle being waged by
the Afro-American people.

Chairman Mao Tse-tung’s statement of August 8, 1963
gave inspiration to a people long and brutally oppressed and dehumanized, then
laboring under the masochist-like philosophy of neo-Gandhism. His words gave impetus
to a floundering and feeble movement of armed self-defence. And today all of the
reactionary world is shocked and terrified by the turbulent winds of ever increasing
armed resistance now sweeping the mighty fortress of savage imperialism and beastly
racism. In racist America’s mighty northern cities, in the small towns, in the
countryside, in the dark and deep jungle wilderness of the southland, from coast to
coast, oppressed and dehumanized black people are meeting oppressive racist
terrorist’s violence with revolutionary violence. The thunder of BLACK POWER echoes
throughout the land. A mighty firestorm sweeps through the ghettoes rife with
rebellion. In their paradise of stolen wealth, ringed by massive arsenals of horrible
death weapons, the tyrannical kings of imperialism tremble from the terrifying shock
of a confrontation with wretched and angry slaves, armed with a common household
match and a bottle of gasoline.

What is the meaning of this cry BLACK POWER in a
land dominated by the unmerciful power of white intruders who murdered and all but
exterminated the rightful owners, the American Indians? Black Power means that
black men want to have some control over their own lives, to have a respected voice
in public affairs that affect them. We resent being a colonial people, treated as
third class citizens in our native land. We resent being forbidden to speak for
ourselves, even in black belts where we constitute as much as 85 percent of the
population. We resent being deformed by a white man’s mold in a degenerate white
supremacy society that derides and belittles our African heritage and make us
ashamed of our ethnic characteristics. Black Power is the vehicle by which we hope
to reach a stage wherein we can be proud black people without the necessity of an
apology for our non-Anglo-Saxon features. The dominant society in racist America is
reactionary, imperialist, racist, and decadent and we wish to disassociate ourselves
from it. Black Power is a dissident force challenging the racist white power
structure that is so heinously exterminating the people of Vietnam and threatening
the world with nuclear destruction.

We have been victims of white racism for 400 years
in the new world. We have been victims of racist barbarism for almost 200 years
under the present form of government. Our people are slaughtered like swine on the
main streets of racist America. Our churches and homes have been bombed. Our women
raped with impunity. Our men have been emasculated. We are hated and murdered for
no other reason than being born black and because we refuse to commend and love our
savage oppressors, we are called racists.

We are oppressed people. Our objective is to
destroy the hurtful stranglehold of our enemy oppressors. An opponent without the
courage to designate his enemy by his true characteristics cannot expect to
confront and defeat him. We propose to call our enemies what they are. We propose
to rally our people and fight on this basis. We do not propose to mince our words
for the sake of peaceful coexistence. It is a natural law that a humble lamb
cannot peacefully coexist with a rabid wolf in close proximity.

Yes, we have some white Americans with us in our
struggle. They are our true brothers. These revolutionaries understand and share
our anger. They know it is justified. Their spirit is an extension of the glorious
spirit of the great and noble antislavery fighter, John Brown. Yes, they too are a
hated and persecuted minority people in Johnson’s majority mob rule Hitlerite
jungle society. Yes, and like all other peoples we have enemies in our ranks. We
have black traitors who practice treason for 30 pieces of silver. We have black
Judases, insensate running dogs for the Johnson administration and its racist
white power structure. Like their white puppet masters, these black puppets too
have days that are numbered.

Our wrath is as intense against the black
lackeys of our white oppressors as it is against the white supremacy oppressors
themselves. These mercenary Uncle Toms are the most vocal nonviolent peace peddlers
in the storm centers of racist America today. The ghettoes are ablaze but they
advocate peaceful submission to continued tyranny and oppression.

Johnson, the great civil rights advocate, the
former senator from the racist state of Texas, who as senator voted against every
civil rights bill that came before the U.S. Senate, claimed to be a modern day
Moses to black Americans so long as they passively allowed themselves to be mauled
and maimed by white supremacy brutes and thugs. But now, with brutal white
supremacy Federal Power, he threatens those who defend themselves, their homes,
and their women and children. Mr. Johnson, the big daddy white supremacist, would
remind our people that we are a minority and the brutal racist white savages are
a majority. Like his fellow-traveling Ku Klux Klansmen, he endeavors to frighten
and intimidate us by the mere numbers of our eternal oppressors. In the same
fashion that Mr. Johnson would like to intimidate the Chinese people with a
massive arsenal of nuclear weapons, he is endeavoring to intimidate the black
American by alluding to great hordes of white supremacists who are ready and
willing to exterminate our people. We say to Mr. Johnson that intimidation,
violence, and brutality will not stop the raging fires in the people’s liberation
struggle. The only force on earth powerful enough to halt the flames engulfing
ghettoes and main streets of racist America consists of fair play, brotherhood,
equality, and justice.

We serve notice on big daddy Texas Lyndon B.
Johnson that he can no more intimidate the Afro-American people with his threat
of unleashing his great hordes of mad-dog racists than he can intimidate the
Chinese people with the threat of unleashing a nuclear attack. The day when
brutal white racist oppressors and imperialists can frighten colored peoples
into submission by threats of savage violence are gone forever!

We revolutionary Afro-Americans respond to Mr.
Johnson and his Ku Klux Klan fraternity of white supremacy with the cry of BLACK
POWER, FREEDOM NOW! JUSTICE! We proclaim our inalienable right to live as human
beings and we shall implement our demand with blood and fire. Yes, Mr. Johnson,
we are a minority but more than that we are an oppressed minority determined at
all costs to be free, and we are resolved to pay any price, to perform any task,
and to go to any length for our freedom.

Yes, we are a minority but we are a minority
with the power of a righteous cause and justice on our side. We are a minority
marching in the endless files of the great multiracial masses of the invincible
anti-imperialist and antiracist forces of the world. For the benefit of Mr.
Johnson, who puts so much stock in numbers, we remind him once again, in the
words a great people’s leader a liberator whose words, thought, and teachings
stand as impeccable in the turbulent winds of time as the mighty Rock of
Gibraltar, yes, we remind him once again that our great leader and
teacher, Chairman Mao Tse-tung has said:

“... We are in the majority and they are
in the minority. At most, they make up less than ten percent of the three
thousand million population of the world. I am firmly convinced that, with the
support of more than ninety percent of the people of the world, the American
Negroes will be victorious in their just struggle. The evil system of
colonialism and imperialism arose and throve with the enslavement of Negroes
and the trade in Negroes, and it will surely come to its end with the complete
emancipation of the black people.”

Today, in the social jungle of racist America
the rights of colored people are less respected than those of common street
dogs. The law and the kangaroo courts of the so-called free world of “Christian”
democracy protect the rights of common street dogs and other dumb animals but
there is not a single court of law that dispenses even-handed justice and
unbiased constitutional and human rights to colored Americans. The long, brutal,
and miserable plight of our people throughout the history of barbaric America
encompasses one of the most shameful and savage chapters in the history of
slavery and man’s injustice to man.

The dominant class in racist America is one
of the most hypocritical the world has ever seen. It captured the African in
Africa, enslaved him, ripped his culture from him, raped him, reproduced from
him, completely dehumanized him, and reduced him to the level of beast of
burden and stamped him with the name Negro as a tribute to the white man’s
creation and invention of a new implement of agriculture and an instrument of
labour. And all the while, he promoted this brutal slavery, he proclaimed
himself architect of democracy and a Christian society. All the while, he
brutally and savagely exterminated the American Indian and piously proclaimed
Thanksgiving to his white god for being so generous in blessing him with the
bounty of the Indian’s rich land and paradise. He built a brutal imperialist
prison wall around the peoples of Latin America and piously named it the
protective Monroe Doctrine. He stretched his bloody hand to Asia and
arrogantly called it an “Open Door Policy.”

The Open Door Policy was the policy of an
armed bandit at the door of a peaceful man. Today, the same bandit rapes and
plunders the land the Vietnam, murders defenseless women and children and
exterminates the people in the name of “free world Christian democracy”.

The same bandit who exterminated and starved
the American Indian on his own native soil now piously proclaims to practice
charity to the nation of India in a hypocritical effort to use them in his
campaign to subdue and enslave the peoples of Asia. What is the nature of his
democracy? What does such a beastly, imperialist, racist savage know about
democracy? Should not democracy, like charity, start first at home, and then
spread abroad? What is the democracy of the Black American captives in the
miserable ghettoes, in the cotton fields of Mississippi, battered by the
savage policeman’s club in Washington, D.C.? What is the democracy of the
Puerto Ricans, of the Mexicans, and of the American Indians in racist America?
Only the most naive can believe the empty words and promise of such a morally
bankrupt charlatan.

Deceptive American white supremacy is
personified by hypocrites like Bobby Kennedy, a sophisticated huckster and
charlatan of the first magnitude who struts and sways into the hotbed of
African white supremacy and colonialism, hugging and kissing black babies and
masquerading as a great white father and savior of the black Africans. Mr.
Kennedy’s actions in racist America are quite a contrast to his deceitful
conduct in Africa. When Mr. Kennedy served as the attorney general of the
U.S.A. he was sworn to uphold the right of equal protection under law, yet he
collaborated with the most barbaric racists in the nation. He entered into a
“white gentleman’s agreement” with the notorious racist governor of Mississippi,
Ross Barnett. Defenseless and helpless black women and children were bombed,
gassed, clubbed, raped, and murdered on the main streets of racist America and
Mr. Kennedy is yet to punish a single white supremacist heathen transgressor.
As attorney general he did nothing about the fact that Africans were being
beaten in the United States, even the diplomats assigned to the United
Nations.

It is strange indeed how Mr. Kennedy can
perform in the racist chorus of those who chant slogans of hatred,
vilification, and dehumanization for black people in America while proclaiming
his pretended great love for black humanity in Africa. Such is the nature of
a deceptive and barbaric Yankee.

In America, Mr. Kennedy publicly proclaims
himself to be opposed to black nationalism. In his white supremacy logic, he
calls it racism in reverse. Black nationalism is a survival reaction to white
nationalism. White nationalism transcends religious, class, social, and
political lines. The reason that no massive black-white unity on a national
scale exists today is that the white supremacy ruling class has poisoned the
minds of white workers. Most white workers identify with their white imperialist
rulers. White liberals insist on paternalism. Even bourgeois minded so-called
socialists are more and more identifying and grouping on a racial basis rather
than on a class basis. We Afro-American revolutionaries have discovered that
some so-called socialists, we thought to be our comrades and class brothers
have joined the international Ku Klux Klan fraternity for white supremacy and
world domination. To our consternation, we have discovered that the bourgeois
orientated power structure of some socialist states, even one with a black and
white population, would prefer to preserve the white reactionary anti-communist
power structure in racist America, their natural national enemy, than to see a
just, democratic, fraternal socialist state brought about by the revolutionary
action of oppressed blacks that would serve the best interests of all peoples
and races. Like their Yankee counterparts that they love to ape so well, even
to the point of emulating their racism, they are moving might and main to
frustrate and defeat the revolutionary movements of the oppressed peoples
throughout the world.

We of the Afro-American liberation movement
resolutely condemn and oppose all counterrevolutionaries and purveyors of white
supremacy whether they cloak their treachery in the garb of Marxist-Leninist
phraseology or the hideous bed sheets of the Ku Klux Klan and its phoney
Christian doctrine.

We who are engaged in the struggle for
liberation and survival vehemently condemn the use of black dehumanized troops
as cannon fodder in a white man’s war of imperialism in Vietnam. We oppose
Johnson’s vicious crusade to dehumanize, emasculate, and enslave the great
Vietnamese people.

Black boys — from the slum housing of black
ghettoes, ill-educated in segregated schools, emasculated and dehumanized by
police brutality and a savage white power structure — yes, black, boys who
cannot find employment, black boys who are victims of white racists who hate
them because of the color of their skin — black boys who mothers, sisters,
and loved ones are being savagely clubbed, gassed, raped, maimed, lynched,
and railroaded to prison in racist kangaroo courts simply for begging and
praying for elementary justice are forced to share foxholes and and shed
their blood alongside racist Negro haters in Vietnam, who like in racist
America refuse to fraternize with them in places of amusement in Tokyo and
Saigon. Even out of proportion to the self-styled master race, vast numbers
of black soldiers are forced to suffer and die in that vain effort to prolong
and extend the brutal racist white man’s imperialism. They are forced to
suffer and die in the cause of a racist power structure that is as much the
enemy of black people in America as it is the people of peace and freedom
loving Vietnam.

And why do we call the massive Ku Klux
Klan type action in Vietnam a racist white man’s war of imperialism while
many black men are fighting there? It is because in racist America no black
man is part of Johnson’s policy-making clique. The United State is governed
by white power. The Pentagon is a white-dominated repressive arm of a ruthless
elite white power structure. Wall Street is an exclusive club of the great
white chiefs of business and industry. Black Americans are resisting the
racist and imperialist lily-white power structure. How can a people who are
fighting and dying simply to wrest the most basic of human rights from an
intransigent and tyrannical power structure be said to be partners of that
power structure and willing participants in its racist and imperialist
ventures and crimes against humanity?

The United States today is a fascist society
more brutal than any the world has ever known. It has all but exterminated a
whole people. It has robbed and raped an entire continent with impunity. It
has divided the peoples of the world into national factions and set them
against themselves and their brothers. With no more authority than the wave
of its bloody imperialist hand it has abrogated the right of self-determination
of small nations. It has appointed and crowned itself both king and armoured
knight of the whole universe. It threatens the globe with annihilation. It
is a super colonial power that is colonializing the colonials.

The world famed and brilliant philosopher,
Lord Bertrand Russell has justifiably stated that racist America has
exterminated more black people than Hitler exterminated Jews in Nazi Germany.
Lord Russell and many other fair-minded humanists throughout the world have
justifiably stated that the U.S. military aggression in Vietnam is executed
in a more cruel and barbarous manner than even the horrible campaigns of
aggression, genocide, and conquest carried out by Hitler’s fascist Germany.

Yet, there is a mighty tendency, promoted
by the sinister American devil himself, to engender more sympathy and
fraternalism for the so-called “good reasonable Americans” than for the
wretched victims of vicious and brutal U.S. imperialism. The U.S. constitutes
one of the greatest fascist threats ever to cast its ugly shadow across the
face of the earth. When the butchers of Nazi Germany were on the plunder,
the world cry was “Crush Nazism!” “Crush the Fascist Power Structure!” “Crush
Germany!” Total war was unleashed without deference to any who may been
considered “good Germans” inside Nazi Germany. No sane person opposed to
fascism pleaded for a soft policy toward Nazi Germany or pleaded for victims
to wait for deliverance through the benevolence of “good German workers and
liberals.” Racist America didn’t give a damn about sparing the good Japanese
people when they dropped their horrible and devastating atom bombs.

What is the motive of those who plead for
the exemption of liberal Americans, whose feigned liberalism merely serves
as a cloak and shield around the naked power of savage and racist U.S.
imperialism? The time is fast approaching when the so-called good reasonable
American must make a decision either to overtly side with American chauvinism
and jingoism or to take a resolute anti-imperialist and anti-racist stand
that will be a firm basis for a just and lasting world peace.

We who are brutally oppressed and victimized
cannot forever afford to spare the fortress of social reaction and tyranny
because there are allegedly silent dissenters within its gates. Those who are
without righteous cause of the oppressed must be prepared to suffer the
consequences of the gathering storm of the violent and turbulent winds of
retribution. A good man who is silent and inactive in times of great injustice
and oppression is no good man at all. He is no ally to freedom and justice
but is a silent partner to tyranny and condemnation. He does not deserve
exemption from the condemnation and the vengeance of those whom his silence
allows to be victimized. The myth of the good reasonable American who is yet
to be heard is a ruse perpetrated by the psychological arm of the imperialist
forces of tyranny. It is one minute to zero in racist America. Four hundred
bloody and gruesome years have passed. For 400 years, our good silent
partners have remained silent and inactive. Time is running out and they
stand at the dividing line still beseeching patience, still beseeching the
slave to leave his fate to his silent friends ever infected with inertia.
They plead for deference on behalf of the good people who yet stand at one
camp. We call to them to separate themselves from the devil’s legions. We
inform them that they have not 400 more years to make a decision but one
minute before the hour of zero, before the Armageddon between the slavemaster
and the slave.

Once again, in closing, let me
thank our great leader and teacher, the architect of people’s warfare, Chairman
Mao Tse-tung, for his great and inspiring statement in support of our
struggle. And to our great Chinese brothers and true revolutionaries
throughout the world, we revolutionary Afro-Americans vow that we shall take
the torch of freedom and justice into the streets of racist America and we
shall set the last great stronghold of Yankee imperialism ablaze with our
battle cry of Black Power! FREEDOM! FREEDOM! FREEDOM! NOW OR DEATH! For our
people, for our country, and for our compatriots throughout the world, we
shall reclaim the nobility of the American Revolution. We shall raise our
flag in honor, true peace, and brotherhood to all the world!

Long live the People’s Republic of China!

Long live Chairman Mao Tse-tung!

Long live the people’s resistance to
imperialism, racism, and tyranny!

Long live the militant friendship between
the Chinese and revolutionary American people!